Only a single respondent said that he knew someone with an Internet addiction, but that was because of an unhappy marriage, rather than anything dangerous about the medium's potential for social networking: "infidelity was common even before the Internet."
Three said that they did feel emotional distress when unable to connect online even for a day, although one respondent said that was because she needed to connect for work-related reasons. All of them said that they used social networking to remain connected to friends and family, and that if they knew that they would be 'off line' for any reason, that they would experience considerable work and personal distress, because that constant 'connectiveness' was demanded in modern society. But they believed their engagement in social networking facilitated rather than hampered real world relationships.
All of the subjects said that being addicted to the Internet was fundamentally different from being addicted to drugs or alcohol, and qualified the use of 'addiction,' even if they said that they thought it might exist in some limited instances. All of them denied every being addicted themselves, or of ever being addicted. Three out of the four subjects said that their lives were better because of the Internet,...
They said they had reconnected with old friends from school, and learned about professional and social opportunities in their immediate community by searching with Google that they could not have found out about, had they merely used a local newspaper.
The respondent who said that he believed his life would be better without the Internet cited the loss of privacy and the fact that he felt that he read less and had a shorter attention span because of the nature of the online world. All four respondents said that sometimes there was pressure to stay 'connected' to their network when they would sometimes like to shut off and decompress from sociability.
On one hand, the online world can shut us off (such as when someone surfs the web while dining out with someone). On the other hand, it can keep us engaged with others 24/7. The Internet is clearly a 'different' kind of sociability than has existed before. However, all four respondents seemed to use the Internet primarily as an enhancement to their daily lives, rather than as an escape, even while agreeing that the Internet could offer the potential for addiction for some vulnerable individuals.
